Slime

I was 25 when I learned that child abuse is a crime. It sounded way funnier in my head.

My body remembers reading June Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights” for the first time. Heat prickling up the sides of my face, my chest caving in on itself, my legs going numb. I couldn’t figure out why; I felt ashamed of the visceral reaction. Relating to the text felt like betrayal to the part of me conditioned to believe I was unworthy of connection. I had to kill the messages my body was sending me. I convinced myself that refusal was an act of reverence, keeping her experience sacred and mine lost.

I have spent the past 2.5 years journeying back to my body’s memory. Re-membering myself limb by limb. Letting sensation return and be my guide has meant coming to terms with the truth of what’s happened to me. It has meant coming to understand what Jordan meant when she said “I have been the meaning of rape.” I spent decades being told that the abuses of others were my birthright. I became a self-correcting machine, programmed to their specifications. Even after freeing myself, it’s taken years to uncover the self I’d kept hidden and precious all that time. Learning my self has meant making space for the truth of all of me—every mask we created to save my spirit.

In the aftermath of physical, psychological and sexual abuse, I had to refuse the identity of victim in order to survive. I became fixated on the idea of a “perfect” victim because it meant I could keep myself outside the pain. It also meant I had to deaden the parts of myself desperately crying out for recovery. I realize now that I was always the perfect victim. I had been conditioned to accept the most abhorrent abuse as me at my best. I would never speak out against my abusers because I wouldn’t have the tools to recognize them as such.

Two weeks ago my body told me “What is rape when your entire life feels like rape?” The truth that tethers me to Jordan is the same truth I must now live my life by. In saving myself I have to rebuke the artifices manufactured by my abusers. I have to believe I’m free now. Lucille Clifton as my meditation: “won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.”